We need to dismantle these tech behemoths so they can't bully smaller companies. This is toxic behavior on Amazon's part, but par for the course for Bezos's company.
And I'm not even necessarily advocating we change our system of governance - we can do it fine with our current one. Even the culture of academia would be fine here. There certainly are skilled scientists who find it more profitable to do secret work in for-profit labs, but far less so than in software. (In large part, that system works because of government-funded universities and government-funded research grants.)
Even in a socialist system, how does it solve the problem of competition, free ridership, and economically non-rival/non-excludable goods like software source code? You still need to collect money but no one has to pay it unless you erect laws that restrict user freedom.
I brought up socialism as a counter example of how there is very little practical way to solve this issue with a different economic system. You’re free to bring up a different example of how an economic system will help the conundrum of preserving economic exchange and user freedom. A Potlatch gift economy perhaps? Except that’s kind of hard to impose.
And I'm mostly agreeing with the comment I'm replying to, because it is concretely thinking seriously about alternative models. "Capitalism, but your company can't get too big" seems fairly compelling tbh.
Any change we want to do within this framework requires changing its rules. The real problem we have to face now is the perpetual growth model, which is a natural consequence of capitalism.
I don't know how and if we can fix this system to prevent perpetual growth without killing its essence. That's the real conversation we should do.
So don't act like someone is offending your religion.
For someone who claims to want a conversation, you're doing a good job of insulting me repeatedly without actually discussing anything relevant to this post.
Hey guess what. It's possible to take an Apache 2.0 codebase, let's say Lucene, and then build more Apache 2.0 code on top of it, give it away entirely for free, and still build a $15B business. And you think capitalism has failed here?
Absolute nonsense.
What I'm actually saying is that when people think that outcome is a bad thing, their beef is with our particular breed of capitalism. When they say "This good outcome could have been so much better, had there been regulations on breaking up large companies so they can't bully small ones," then what they're saying is that they're objecting to the free market as it exists in our particular breed of capitalism. And when they say, as others say, "This good outcome could have been so much better if it weren't for the dictators at the OSI micromanaging the term 'open source'," then what they're actually saying is they're objecting to companies freely choosing to believe what the OSI says, because the OSI has no power. If you think that something was short of the mark here, that something was our breed of capitalism.
I'm agreeing with you. Capitalism did not fail. It did what everyone expected it to do. If you're happy with the outcome, great! I'm not telling anyone they ought to be unhappy with the outcome. But if you are unhappy with the outcome, I'm telling you why.
> This good outcome could have been so much better, had there been regulations on breaking up large companies so they can't bully small ones
Well, I disagree with the (I think?) implication that Amazon is doing any bullying here, and I disagree that companies should be broken up purely for their size. But since we're getting into anti-trust authority, perhaps I can convince you to throw the ring into Mordor:
While anti-trust could theoretically fight monopolies, those laws exist within a system in which special interests will co-opt those powers to essentially defend their own monopolies. So, big company X kicks over the right amount of lobbying dollars and magically the politicians want to bring an anti-trust suit against competitor Y, etc.
Now the blue-pilled response is to say, "hey that's just another failure of capitalism, and that's why we need to get money out of politics!". In my unashamedly biased opinion, the red-pilled answer is to realize that these power structures will always be co-opted and the best solution is decentralization and therefore not having a state that can hand out bailouts, force small businesses to close up shop, discriminate against low-skilled workers with minimum wage regulations, exert arbitrary power through anti-trust legislation, etc.
Sorry, I kind of got down a philosophical rabbithole.
We're having this whole conversation about whether big companies might subvert and coerce the state without recognizing that they already do coerce it by making the state recognize their very existence. They would have no power without that (what is a lobbyist without anything to lobby on behalf of?), but they've been so successful at hawking their narrative that all of us think it's perfectly normal and inevitable that they exist.
Take that red-and-black pill (either because it's half-doomer or because it's ancom, either way) and chew on it.
I seem to recall something like this. I also recall working with ES and having a negative impression on it based on some technical detail - but I can't recall what that was :-/
Why not? The government already distinguishes between a corp and a person - why can't licences do the same?
As an aside, the flip-side of not being payed is less liability. Charging people for your library could make you liable for security issues? Since security is important, maybe there is room for improvement on both sides of the aisle.